All entries for Tuesday 30 May 2017

May 30, 2017

You wrote to me on 25 April: “I wanted to let you know that at the General Election, to be held on June 8th, I will be standing again. I have proudly represented Coventry South for 25 years, and I believe that I can continue standing up for Coventry.”

You asked for my support. I was a Labour supporter and voter in every General Election from 1970 to 2005. I voted for you many times. Led by Gordon Brown, Labour lost my support in 2010. I see no chance of Jeremy Corbyn winning it back.

Every major party in this election has good and bad in its manifesto, and that includes the Labour Party. But Labour’s present leaders are tarnished by their past hostility to our armed forces and security services, our nuclear deterrent, and our NATO membership. Whatever they say now is compromised by their sympathy, sometimes open and sometimes poorly concealed, for authoritarian regimes, anti-semitic causes, and terrorist factions around the world.

Jeremy Corbyn has justifed his past contacts with terrorists by the necessity to talk to "people you profoundly disagree with." But there is reason to think that, at the time, he saw the terrorists he talked to not as people he disagreed with but as friends. He explains the terrorists' actions, in part, as responses to our own past foreign policies. But this carries little weight when the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks worldwide have no such explanation.

As well as having repellent views on these matters, Corbyn and Abbot stand out as incompetent. But not all your leaders are incompetent. McDonnell, Milne, and Murray are evidently capable people. That makes them worse, not better. Their competence is sinister. I fear for our future if such people ever got their hands on the machinery of the British state. That outweighs any other reason I might have to vote for you.

Your letter states: “The country needs change.” I agree. But, just when change is needed, the Labour Party has managed to offer an alternative that is also unacceptable. The Labour Party needs change. If you would acknowledge this, you would put country before party.

I am a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick. I am also a research associate of Warwick’s Centre on Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, and of the Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Birmingham. My research is on Russian and international economic history; I am interested in economic aspects of bureaucracy, dictatorship, defence, and warfare. My most recent book is One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State (Hoover Institution Press, 2016).